Episode #292: I'm Popular In A Bad Way

I needed something relaxing to look at while I'm writing this particular post, because the topic of choice is something that I thought I would never have to deal with in my blogging life, but here we is.

I was comparing my weekly Statcounter reports with the amount of page views that this blog and my book blog had been getting for the past month or so (as well as my other dormant blogs) and the math wasn't mathing.

Example: last week I was averaging a daily page view for this blog of 4.9 and the book blog of about 1 per day. Yet looking at the view count for my last blog post was sitting at 196 views, while my book blog post was sitting at an aggregate total of 561. 

I ruminated on this troubling statistic and I eventually came to the sadly plausible explanation for the sudden uptick in page views was that all of my blogs are being scrapped/pilfered for content. Obviously I'm none-too-pleased about this depressing development.

I spent a solid week ruminating on what I was going to do about my blogging going forward, and the few ideas that I had come up with, weren't really feasible for me. The first idea that crossed my mind was simply writing a short blog post on my Facebook author's page then link to here on the blog. While I did change the settings for the page so that you don't have to be a member of Meta to view it, but I have not figured out how to paste the link to a FB post elsewhere, and would inconvenient to everyone if I said on a blog post, "hey, look for my FB post dated xx/xx/xxxx to read the blog post."

The second idea was to create a newsletter that people could subscribe to in order to read my blog posts. But that was problematic on sooooo many levels that I sent that idea to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

So having discarded those ideas, I'm still left with the quandary of what to do about my blogging going forward. While I don't plan on giving up on my blogging (been doing it now for the better part of seventeen years), I do plan on making a bunch of changes going forward.

I plan on tweaking what I actually blog about. Instead of ruminating on whatever happens to strike my fancy, I plan on narrowing my scope to simply the following four items.

1} My family bookcase: I have a huge eclectic bookcase to share with everyone. Archival memory is always a good thing to have, especially when it comes to books, and trust me, my memory is quite encyclopedic when a given situation calls for it.

2} My personal bookcase: mine is about the same size in totality, as it kitty corners, and is chock full of all kinds of interesting things to explore and opine about.

3} My vast music collection, which is located in that kitty corner and my den

4} My writing: which is the original topic that all of my blogs were predicated on. I will still opine about that, but will try to tighten it up to make it not so specific, unless I'm promoting one of my books.

In regards to my other blogs, I started the process of shutting down 99% of three remaining blogs that people could actually peruse: Cedar's Mountain; Father Nature's Corner and It's Always Saturday In Suburbia (my adult blog). I say 99%, as I turned all but one post into draft mode, eliminated the page tabs and any out-of-date advertising on them. My short story blog has already been completely deactivated using the same method, going on now for at least five years. Because of this, any links that you may come across directing you to the first two blogs will be broken and unusable. My picture blog will stay open for those to peruse at their leisure.

So my friends, this post is probably not what you're expecting to read, but it's the one that needed to be made, albeit quite reluctantly. Next week we will be back to our semi-abnormal self covering one of the aforementioned topics.

Have a fantastic start to your week.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #291: The Family Bookcase: {1}

In my basement we have two monstrosities that pass for bookcases: the family bookcase that basically stretches some ten feet across a side wall, and mine that stretches some four feet down the side wall in front of my den. Starting with this post, we'll be doing a skewered exploration on the contents of the family bookcase, and alternate a few about my bookcase.

Our family bookcase contains about 60 years worth of books collected in a few different ways: directly purchased from bookstores, acquired on the dirt cheap (aka free) from various people who were bringing/purging their collections. 

Just to give you a basic idea of what kind of books/reading material taking up space, we have the following: old mystery/sci-fi magazines; religious materials, encyclopedias, fiction, pop culture and different types of non-fiction that one would find in schools/universities. Like I said, this is just a sampling.

Wherever I walk by the bookcase, I'm always on the lookout for a particular missing repro book from the late 19th century, specifically, memoirs from the US Civil War (I bought some 35 years ago, two different Time-Life book series that totaled almost 65 volumes, each one costing, on average, $14.99 (not counting S&H) in 1980's money). When I was creating my own personal bookcase, I discovered I was missing one volume from the memoir series, thus the need for perpetually searching the bookcase.

Because of the type of books we have stashed in a bookcase that will never be read, there are titles/topics that often jump out at me, simply because of how strange the topic is. For our first example, we have this:

To be honest, I do not recall how this particular book made it to our family bookcase, but since my brother is a bit of a mild hoarder, I'm thinking it came to us courtesy of him.

Now, I know absolutely zero about cricket and I'm 100% positive that no one in the house knows anything about cricket. I think I tried watching it once or twice, but when you don't know anything about a sport that is popular everywhere except the US, you kind of say to yourself, "No." and move on.

This is but one of about two dozen sports oriented books housed within that large bookcase, which run the gamut of encyclopedias, memoirs, histories and compilations, covering mostly baseball, with a few football and one emphasizing World Cup soccer....and one that's a short history of Bundesligia, which is German soccer (fun fact: our local PBS affiliate used to host a weekly German soccer game called "Soccer Made In Germany", which my dad used to watch every Sunday.

~~~~~~~

I have five of these highly informative baseball encyclopedias. This particular baseball encyclopedia was around from the 1970's through 2009, was a baseball junkie's wet dream. It had everything a junkie would want: a detailed synopsis of every season (both AL & NL) as well as the final standings; with a statistical breakdown of each team's total player stats; it also included a breakdown of each world series (and divisional playoffs); divided the entirety of baseball (1876 thru 2009) by periods/eras; lifetime stats were also divided by the same periods/eras; and even included the two years that the Federal League was around (1914 & 1915), fun fact: Wrigley Field initially belonged to the Chicago Whales, the Federal League ball-club before they disappeared with the Federal League did. Overall this was a fantastic detailed history about Major League Baseball.

This baseball encyclopedia was the catalyst for me getting into the minutiae of baseball for a number of years, and everything else that I've managed to come across I compare to this encyclopedia, and I found those...wanting.

This was and remains to this day, my absolute favorite encyclopedia of my absolute favorite sport (I became a NY Mets fan since I got cable t.v. in the late 70's), and it still has an influence on me as a person and as a writer to this day.

As the title of this post states, this is the 1st part of what I hope to make a reoccurring feature on this blog: a sampling of books that were read maybe once or twice, then became a part of a very eclectic collection of books that me, myself and I would ever read, as I seem to be the only hardcore reader in my household.

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved

Episode #290: It's Been Traveling Like A Car With Four Square Wheels

This is pretty much how last week went: crashing hard after surfing through the dullness of reality.

The picture pretty much sums up the past week that was, in that there wasn't much of newness to it, just a leveling off from the plateau of freshness into the mesa of staleness.

The only thing of note that I was consistently working on, besides finally getting to the last stage of publishing the print version of my novella, which was fraught with serious examples of self-inflicted obtuseness that created extra work that didn't need to happen, was my post fantasy chapter outline/bullet points for my recently completed series.

One of my little quirks that will sometimes raise its fugly head is that I can be extremely....focused on certain peripheral items that are related to the original project that I would be working on. This chapter outline/synopsis is one such item.

This soon to be 150+ page monstrosity allowed me to go into further detail with my note taking, in that allowed me to properly plan out how certain chapters should be rewritten and/or revitalized. For example, some time during the second volume of the series, I decided to refocus on how I wrote chapters. Instead of writing a chapter with competing plotlines between two main characters (that ultimately became three) that would occasionally meet up throughout the series, I decided it would be easier to alternate chapters between each of the main characters.

This made things so much easier for me to handle, as each character would have their own chapter devoted to their particular plot line, plus all of the various tangents within that plotline, with the occasional crossover to the other plotlines, until the final three chapters.

So this is how I've been keeping myself occupied in the morning/afternoon/evening: churning out what I will predict to be 105+ pages of pure, unadulterated, board certified doctor scribble. And I do mean doctor scribble. My printing is bad to begin with, and my note taking has ramped up the scribble to the point of being undecipherable, like a court reporter's note taking.

Like it's now turned into a hybrid mix of printing/cursive handwriting, complete with words that are supposed to be, say seven letters long for example, being chopped down to maybe four, with no vowels and letters that could masquerade for six others (yes, my scribble is just. that. bad.). My scribble is what doctors should aspire to and what pharmacy techs should loudly curse to the bowels of hell over.

So....that's been my basic to-do list for the past couple of months, but up until last week, I was able to do other things around it so that I would break up the monotony of a dreaded, but highly necessary addition to the laborious proper editing of this series.

Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Absolutely....in 2026, after I publish one final re-re-re-write of a previously published novella that I was severely disappointed with mere days after it went live.

Have a fantastic start to your month of September!

{c} 2025 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved